Archive/File: people/i/irving.david/libel.suit/transcripts/day027.15
Last-Modified: 2000/07/25
. P-131
Q. Can I ask you to look at the first item in the bundle of
documents I gave you? It is a letter from me to The Times
dated July 11th 1986.
A. Page 1.
Q. Am I complaining to The Times that, having reported my
deportation from Austria, they have not reported with one
line the fact that the deportation has been ruled illegal
and the Minister has been ordered to pay compensation?
You will see on the following page The Times item that
reports this little victory.
A. It seems so.
Q. The final paragraph of page 3, The Times item, says: "The
spokesman for the Ministry of Justice said Mr Irving will
be bringing a case for wrongful arrest against the
officials involved later this year". So it is not just as
cut and dried as you said, is it, deported from Austria?
A. Just it occurred and so I refer to it.
Q. It occurred and you refer to it. But you then say in the
two lines from the bottom that he is banned from entering
Australia.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, can I interrupt you again? Do
forgive me for doing so. I am not remotely ----
MR IRVING: Interested.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: "Impressed" is the word I was going to use,
or will be influenced by the fact that you have been
banned and deported from these various countries. It
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seems to me I have to make up my own mind.
MR IRVING: It very marginally goes to the accuracy of this witness.
MR RAMPTON: No. Anyway, Mr Irving was reading from the
pleadings and not from Professor Funke's report. I make
no capital out of the fact that he is banned. Your
Lordship is obliged as a matter of comity not to comment
on the deportations, but I much prefer that we make up our
own minds, or your Lordship makes up your own mind, in
this court whether Mr Irving deserved to be banned, which
is quite a separate question.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is entirely the way I intend to approach
it. I can see you resent it, but I think you can forget
about it, or forget about them, the deportations, for the
purposes of this case.
MR IRVING: I will say in one line what I would have said about
Australia and Canada, my Lord. Banned from Australia is
because the labour Prime Minister said I was a bad
character. They changed the immigration law to make it
possible. Banned from Canada was because of a technical
infringement of the Immigration Act. It was nothing to do
with the Holocaust denial views. That was what I had
hoped to elicits in this particular piece of
cross-examination.
In paragraph 1.3.2, on page 9, five lines from
the bottom, you suggest that my diaries have been
. P-133
sanitized for other readers. This is quite a serious
suggestion to make in view of the fact that the diaries
are before the court. What justification do you have for
the allegation that I sanitized the diaries, 20 million
words of them, before making them available to the court?
A. Of course, this is a judgment, or a value statement, an
assessment. There are important phases I did not see,
I mean periods of time I did not see. Maybe you did not
put something in your diary, and of course, and this is
the main point, the things we figured out by other sources
with respect to the letter and to the events are not
stated there as intense as private things that I am not
interested in. So I had to read and make up my own mind
by other sources. So in that sense it gives not a full
picture of your interaction so far as they are important
for the case that is at stake in the court.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can I see whether there is a misunderstanding
because there may be. Are you, by the use of the
word "sanitized", suggesting that Mr Irving has
manipulated or redacted, and I am not sure what the
redacted is, the diaries? "Redact" is a very curious word.
A. I would say of course all diaries are redacted in the mind
of the people and, with respect to what is at stake here,
they are of course, I would say, redacted. Look at the
Halle event, so you see a full scale different picture.
. P-134
Q. I follow that. What I am trying to get at, and I cannot
quite think of the right term, is are you suggesting that
Mr Irving has deliberately altered the diaries after the
event in order to present a different picture from what
would originally have been given?
A. I did not say this.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think that perhaps was a misunderstanding.
MR IRVING: I could not let that pass, my Lord. I had to draw
attention to it, and also the following phrase that I have
to draw attention to is four lines from the bottom: "As
will be set out below important passages in Irving's
diaries have not been released to the defence". What
basis do you have for making that allegation that implies
that I have withheld documents on discovery?
A. It implies that you did your diary, and all of a sudden
interrupted your diary. Because of this assumption, there
are left out very interesting phases in the course of your
activities in Germany and Austria. In Germany.
Q. You do accept that the way either you have expressed
yourself or the way it has been translated into English,
it gives the impression that I have had these pages of
diaries and that I have taken them out of the file.
A. I cannot say this.
Q. I have said I am not going to give them to the defence lawyers.
A. No, I cannot say this. I cannot say that you did
. P-135
something deliberately against ----
Q. Because that would actually be a contempt of court and, if
I was to do that, I would be culpable.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: Not suggested.
MR IRVING: Not suggested. On the following page, two lines
down, you make the same suspicion that I have not
disclosed crucial speeches. Are you just saying again
that I did not transcribe them, or that I did transcribe
them, or I did have tapes and did not make them available
to the lawyers? It is the same question.
A. Again, it is not a deliberate assumption, assumption of
deliberativeness, that it was done deliberately. I cannot
say this because I have no proof of it, so I will not.
But, of course, there are crucial speeches not there. One
of them we will get in the next hour or so.
Q. Yes, because, of course, if I had edited the diaries or
the speeches, then I would have taken out the little
racist ditty that Mr Rampton thinks I should be horse
whipped for.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is not suggested you have doctored them.
MR IRVING: You refer in paragraph 1.3.3, which is page 10, and
I think this is a useful place to take it on, to the
German Office for the Protection of the Constitution,
which has been busy monitoring extremist organizations, as
you describe. Now, can you explain to the court what the
structure of the OPC is? There is an overall Federal
. P-136
body, is there not?
A. Yes.
Q. And each of provinces has its own provincial OPC. Is it a
political body?
A. No, it is a state institution on the Federal level and on
the provincial or state level the like. They have their
duty, according to the constitutional law and to various
laws that were given by the parliament, to observe
extremism of my kind, to monitor, and this is the main function.
Q. Yes, but it is a body that in each case, both at Federal
level and at provincial level, is subordinated to the
Minister of the Interior, who is a political animal, is he
not? He has the say?
A. I have to reiterate what I said. It is not a political
body. They have to stick to the rules. I do not know, it
goes with the idea, and to a degree realized idea,
that state officials stick to the rules, stick to the
laws, and are not politicisable.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, I am wondering whether this is not
in a way a bit similar to courts in foreign countries
making decisions that you be deported and banned and so
on. I do not think I am really very concerned, am I, with
the views or activities of the OPC?
MR IRVING: You are, my Lord, if I may respectfully say so,
because much of his report depends on the reports provided
. P-137
by the OPCs. He quotes them extensively as though they
are the word of God. If I can establish to the court's
satisfaction that the OPCs are political animals created,
run and generated as propaganda instruments by the
government agencies and the government ministers
concerned, which is why they never criticise the activity
of the established parties, even when they are
unconstitutional, and demonstrably so, then this would
devalue whatever these people have to say about
unfortunate people who come under their magnifying glass.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. I suppose that is right.
MR IRVING: Let me just put to you, Professor Funke, a decision
of the constitutional court in Germany, that, when the OPC
ruled that a party was right-wing radical or right-wing
extreme, or was an enemy of freedom, and I will give you
the German in a moment, and a danger for the liberal
democratic basic order, then this was a value judgment
which the Federal Minister of the Interior was uttering in
pursuance of his constitutional duty to protect the
liberal democratic basic order. I will say it to you in
German now (German read from document not provided). In
other words, this is a statement of the Supreme Court in
Karlsruhe, which states that it is purely the opinion of
the minister when he decides that a party is right-wing
extreme or not.
A. Can I see it?
. P-138
Q. It gives the actual source. I have highlighted it in
yellow for you. The footnote is the source.
A. Thank you.
Q. The point is that such statements defining people as
right-wing extreme are the opinion of the minister, a
value judgment and not a statement of fact.
A. Things are a bit more complicated. That is why I do
not
know, this is also important for this context, I do
not
know the context of what is said here. So there are
different levels of decision-making processes of the
BundesVerfassungsgerichte, the highest court in
Germany.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: I really do feel, I am sorry again to
interrupt you, Professor Funke, this is not going to
help. We are getting terribly ----
MR IRVING: Into detail.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, on the contrary. I think what counts is
really what these individuals and parties have said and
done. I take your point, which is why I did not stop you,
that the views expressed by the OPC probably do not count
for a huge amount, but I do not think we want to go into a
detailed analysis of what the German Supreme Court has
said about the way in which the OPC performs its
function. That is what I am really getting at.
MR IRVING: I would hope that you would attach more value to
the opinion of the German Supreme Court than to myself in
this matter.
. P-139
MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am not sure that really either in a sense
is particularly material. That is no criticism,
obviously, of either of you.
MR IRVING: As long as your Lordship bears this in mind when we
come to judgments on these bodies and people uttered by
the OPCs and I may remind you of it.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am more interested in Professor Funke's own
view rather than a reflection of somebody else's.
MR IRVING (To the witness): Professor Funke, lower down on
page 10, paragraph 1.3.4, you say that some of your
sources are what I would consider anti-fascist?
A. This is a very interesting point.
Q. Well, briefly, please?
A. Yes, briefly. I had to rely for the insider report that
was done after the Michael Schmidt film on a source that
was given by an anti-fascist so-called, self-described
anti-fascist group, and that is because these groups, and
I met them personally to be sure that I get the data
right, these groups are near to this right-wing extremist
scenery. So, in a given moment, for a special question,
I had, for example, to identify one of these persons,
I had to go to these sources, but I never, by each person
are restrained to these sources. So I checked them double
or triple to make a good judgment.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.

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